Prot Pally - Raid Talk

This thread is just pally talk, how strong we are, and our threat.

Went to my pally as a MT like 2 weeks ago, after rerolling from a dk to monk (to pally)...

My guild is new, created by me and a few mates this expansion, and many raiders are complete new to raiding, along with that we've had many ISP issues (Thanks VM!), however we have managed to clear MSV quite fast and even the first on hc, im quite sure we can get 2nd down as we was having trouble on shield phase but managed to do it perfectly, but the dc happened.. anyway more onto the point;

i tanked my first MSV on the pally as a MT in 463ilvl, this is the same week the guild was progressing Stone guards HC for the first time, and killed it. I took like 6m more dmg than the OT who was like 482ilvl BDK.
This week being at 472ilvl i took only 2m more damage, i see lots of people talk about pallys being bad and such but they feel really strong, i've tanked MSv on my dk, monk and pally and my pally seems to be the strongest/feel the strongest, althought hes under all their ilvl.

Threat question... i've been a tank for basically the whole time i've played wow in a serious matter (after my first 80 which took me months to lvl! had hardly any idea what i was doing and such) and i use a few addons and such to make sure if i am almost loosing agro i know, or if i have lost agro/someones taunted and such. since patch 5.1 (first day actually) i've seen warriors pull INSANE threat as dps spec (not defensive stance) it seems buggy, but also since that the Blood dks threat seems higher, if he main tanks the boss he over agros on taunt etc, even after i salv him to reduce his threat for 10 secs.

Is threat buggy since 5.1? i mentioned the dps warrior having agro in LFR (he wasnt even top dps, doing about 50k lol), perfect example of why i think also;
- Stone guard trash, the quillen packs, i pulled did 75k aoe as the big quillen transform happens and 1 tank needs to OT it away, blood dk had like 40/50k dps, yet he had like 80% of the pack agro'd i was pulling more dps and such and it made no sense, only that blood dks must have higher TPS than Paladins. Is this a known thing? intended? or am i the only one seeing this.

dps wars pulling threat is normal, dont know why though. As for TPS, DKs seem to maybe be higher than other tanks, but umm... it doesnt matter, at all. our DK likes to strut about how he pulls threat off the other tank on trash but it makes absolutely zero difference on boss fights :P

We had the issue of a Fury Warrior pulling aggro at pull on Gara'jal hc on the day 5.1 hit. The strange thing is, that he was nowhere near on omen, so it wasn't predictable. This only happened once, so it could have been a bug. God knows.

About Salvation, if you haven't noticed yet, the spell functions differently than it used to. It doesn't actually reduce the target's threat, but sort of makes the enemies ignore it for 10 seconds. He doesn't generate any threat during this time (?), but regains the existing threat after the buff runs out.
As far as I'm concerned, DK tanks have already had higher single target threat than any other tank class, but especially with Salvation you shouldn't have a hard time doing more threat. I would suggest that you save your HA and SW for the taunt if you aren't already, since HA is probably your strongest physical damage reduction cooldown as well due to increasing the uptime on SotR buff, and therefor absolute waste when you're not tanking.

Don't be too concerned about your threat on trash compared to other tanks. Vengeance can cause a sort of snowball effect here; the more mobs the other tank gets aggro from on the pull, the more vengeance he will gain, which will increase his threat to a point where you're going to have a hard time pulling aggro due to low vengeance.

I feel like paladins are one of, if not the strongest tank overall right now. Most people talking about paladins being weak and bad is because, well, most paladins are bad. People are playing paladins like it is still Cata and fail to realise how much the basics of tanking has changed.

Personally, the only threat issue I ever get is having to high threat. A tactic that we frequently use during tank swaps is that I use hand of salvation on myself and after 9 seconds just before the salv runs out the other tank just taunts again. ( Since naturally I will have aggro when the salv runs out )

This week in Terrace, I turned my RF of during a tank swap on Koalon in P3 simply to not get aggro back. After the kill, forgot to put RF back on. Proceeded to tank Tsulong without RF. Did not even notice RF was off until the third add phase on Lei-Shi where I lost aggro for 1 sec to a dps.

Dps warrior that pulled threat from you was probably in defensive stance.

Paladins are a bit weak on burst AoE threat, so if another tanks wants to, he can take AoE aggro over a paladin tank. Paladins have very good substained AoE threat though, so if you just get the initial 5 seconds of threat noone is gonna take that from you.

Went to my pally as a MT like 2 weeks ago, after rerolling from a dk to monk (to pally)...

i tanked my first MSV on the pally as a MT in 463ilvl, this is the same week the guild was progressing Stone guards HC for the first time, and killed it. I took like 6m more dmg than the OT who was like 482ilvl BDK.
This week being at 472ilvl i took only 2m more damage, i see lots of people talk about pallys being bad and such but they feel really strong, i've tanked MSv on my dk, monk and pally and my pally seems to be the strongest/feel the strongest, althought hes under all their ilvl.

Pallies aren't bad at all. I find overall dmg taken isn't a great metric but how much damage you take compared to how much you heal. In theory, if you heal all the damage you take who cares how much dmg you take? Three things that are important to reduce dmg taken / increase self or raid healing are:
- Seal of insight along with glyph of battlehealer, heals you and the raid
- Never let sacred shield fall off and refresh it after high dmg phases since it stacks with vengeance
- Talents are situational and play a big role. For instance on the doggies most of the dmg tanks take is from the dot so hand of purity on CD is amazing for reducing dmg

Pallies aren't bad at all. I find overall dmg taken isn't a great metric but how much damage you take compared to how much you heal. In theory, if you heal all the damage you take who cares how much dmg you take? Three things that are important to reduce dmg taken / increase self or raid healing are:
- Seal of insight along with glyph of battlehealer, heals you and the raid
- Never let sacred shield fall off and refresh it after high dmg phases since it stacks with vengeance
- Talents are situational and play a big role. For instance on the doggies most of the dmg tanks take is from the dot so hand of purity on CD is amazing for reducing dmg

Overall I think pallies are in a good place atm.

This is just in regards to the warrior.

Warriors are one of the few classes - and the only plate class - whose stat priority has crit higher than haste. There's a lot of reasons for this, but they aren't really worth getting into.

What does deserve mention though is that when all CDs are popped a warrior will often be running with greater than 50% crit, is probably single minded fury which means they'll be hitting very quickly and their crits will be doing 20% more critical damage, in addition to having done a colossus smash on the foe so that their attacks are bypassing armor and critting even harder.

What it all comes down to is that like paladins warriors are a wrecking-ball-on-demand. So when all the stars line up and they are focusing down on one enemy you stand a good chance of possibly losing aggro.

The other thing to remember is that if it was Stone Guard that fight seems to have aggro issues for everyone because of, I dunno. I'd say just the mechanics of the whole shebang, always seems like 1/2 the time the tank only has aggro on the one enemy everyone's not fighting.

Depending on how you gear, we can take more or less damage at the end of a fight, but that's not really important. What is important is that the damage you take is coming it smooth and steadily not spiky. I almost always take more damage than my warrior co-tank, but I stack hit/exp/haste where he goes for a more mastery type build and I've been the easier one to keep up and heal for the most part.

Our single target threat is pretty fine, but dk's are still the top damage as tanks I believe so its not mystery that he would win a threat battle, but it should be who gets up on pull duty to pick up the boss first and the other tank needs to manage his threat. Our aoe threat is not as great though, I wouldn't call it bad but Ithink we are not great as warriors or dks since our aoe's are split among our targets and warriors and dks spread their dots which aren't affected like our aoe.

The dk will get aggro on the quillen is because he spreads dots to all the little ones that count as single target, where as all of our abilities are aoe and get nerfed by the 90% aoe buff the trash gets.

Cheers for replies, as i said, the dk didnt out damage me, i was beating him easily by 20k dps, the quillens were not affected by the 90% reduction till the big one spawned and he already had agro (even though i'm over dpsing him by a lot).

I know our single etc is fine, i can pull more dps than a dk easily, it was just threat questions, it seems like even with the exact same dmg, dk > pally on threat. and of course the annoying/weird warrior bug (?).

About survivability, i was asking cause a lot have said pallys are spikey, i didn't think they were/are and i still dont, just wanted to see others opinions ^^

I've had threat issues with the Quillen trash too, running with a bear. We are the same ilevel, but he's wearing conquest gear (he's an offtank) although I am threat capped. It gets embarassing - I pull the packs but can't keep one mob. I haven't had a problem with dps, although we don't have a warrior in our raid team atm.

Single target i feel okay, but on aoe it feels like we are the weakest on snap threat atm. monk aoe is just insane, and dks pull everything off again on the first blood boil, basicly have to speed of light and dive in to get some advantage with vengeance..

But we shouldnt complain too much.. for 10m atm we are probably the best, not saying strongest tank, our toolkit, selfhealing with SoI (cleave especcially) Glyph of the battle healer (on cleave again its absolute madness) all our hands and other external/raid cd's + our owns cd's. Sacred shield with a bunch of vengeance, and HASTE STACKING!!

Any other tank seems to go crying whenever we discuss how to counter things better, the pala usually has a solution.. Example: garjal hc... Oh hey I'l just bop the other tank.. it sure makes him feel useful.. but no one takes dmg thru vodoo dolls at ALL wich is AMAZING on progress. i could go on and on about how much I love my prot pala atm
A little lack of snap threat is a rock in the ocean.. i do agree its a tad weak tho but bleh.. double valor upgraded my weapon, since cs/HoR scales with it, helps a little.. very fun in random hcs